Angelus of Bells: Ten Love Poems of Logic and Loss

“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
--Lord Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”


Who among us has not been in love, and lost? While writing in the midst of grief, Tennyson may not have realized how often his words of wisdom would be called upon to help soothe the brokenhearted. And for anyone willing to express their grief in words, poetry is often the language of choice. Such a universal emotion as loss has indeed brought out the poet in many of us. It’s not as common as you would think, however, to find romantic loss and wisdom in the same poem. Poets are often too caught up in their own grief and misery to create poems that aren’t mired in self-pity. While reading through poems about lost love, I have discovered that there is a fine art to crafting a poem built around such passion and emotion, while constructing it with intelligence and purpose and not drowning the words themselves in tears.

To that end, this anthology brings together a collection of poems that speak to the carefully crafted way that poems can express loss without being overly sentimental. All too often poetry about love – lost love in particular – leads the reader to an outpouring of grief of suicidal proportions: “I miss you; I can’t live without you, why did you leave me? What have I done wrong?” And usually there is much weeping and anger and bitterness. No doubt this is true: heartache can lead to despair, and no one can deny that poetry is a valid and creative outlet for releasing the pure sadness that is left after the loss of a relationship. There is a fine line, however, that many “poets” are guilty of crossing when expressing grief. Too much melodrama and sentimentality can actually bog a poem down into amateurism. This can cause the poem to lack significance for the reader, who wants to identify with the universal theme, not necessarily the poet’s personal loss.

Poems that are overly sentimental can also cause readers to assume, incorrectly, that any poem having to do with lost love is purely personal, emotional drivel -- not to be taken seriously on any intellectual level. I think the poems presented here prove quite the opposite: by using various poetic elements such as symbolism and imagery, as well as occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of the “sadness” of the loss described, expert poets can create a world that causes readers to think, as well as feel an emotional connection to the poem.

Certainly worthy of their own collection, these ten poems offer a rare look into how masterful poets take such heart-rending loss and use poetic elements to engage the reader. But be warned: these poems are not without emotion. Just because the poet expertly walks the line without going over the bridge of sentimentality, doesn’t mean the poetic waters below lack depth. Quite the opposite effect occurs: here, the poets appear to convey loss without really trying. It is an expert balancing act, and they succeed beautifully. There is no need for the poet to say, effectively, “I’m collapsing here in a pool of tears.” There is a fine art to expressing this emotion and relating it to the reader who can appreciate it, without being told directly in so many words, “You must cry here. I must tell you by my words that my heart is broken, therefore yours must be too.” In essence, these ten poems are fine examples of sentimental restraint. The emotion is in the scene, in the lover’s absence, in the grand scheme, the loss itself.


In choosing a title for this anthology I wanted to address aspects of the poems that emerge as a cllection. “Angelus of bells” is a unique phrase found in one of my favorites, Conrad Aiken’s “And Already the Minutes.” The term caught me off guard when I read it years ago, and has stuck with me ever since. In the poem it doesn’t seem necessary to read it as its literal definition, which is the Catholic call to prayer and devotion (New Advent). For me it has come to mean the “glorious” sound that is heard in the midst of being madly in love. This is the sound these ten poems remember; this is what has been lost. The sound is what could have been, what you hear when you think of your lost lover. As a collection, these poems attempt to reconcile the loss of this sound, this person, through a logical means: acknowledgement and acceptance.

One thing I particularly love about these poems is that the speaker in each one addresses the lost love directly, allowing each poem to read like a secret love letter from the head and heart. This direct “contact,” this expressing the emotion through the art of poetry, seems to save the poet from despair. As Elizabeth Bishop tells herself so achingly, “Write it!” From this, it seems as though describing the pain of loss in an intelligent, logical way gives the poet the strength to continue on, all the while knowing that their lost lover may never actually hear their words.

As a collection the poems also speak to each other by the use of various poetic elements and themes. Understandably, many of them use the inevitable passage of time to show how the speaker must deal logically with the loss. As we’ve all heard, “time waits for no one.” It reminds us, as we mourn any kind of loss, that we must move on. We must try to cope and think and press forward, for as much as we wish we could, we cannot stay in the moment. Aiken acknowledges this throughout his poem and in the title itself, “And Already the Minutes.” Time is passing, it cannot be stopped. It is almost portrayed as an invisible enemy, who always wins.

Gary Snyder’s “Four Poems for Robin” addresses this dilemma by reminiscing about spending various seasons together before the lovers broke up and “left it behind at nineteen.” He says

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known
where you were -
…I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

As the poem reminds us, there is no going back; the present reality is inescapable. He even speculates that wrongdoing in a past life has brought upon the pain in this one, as “[his] karma demands.” As revealed in these poems, the loss is part of a continuum in time.

Others also lament the passage of time, specifically the seasons, and how they play into memory. Pablo Neruda’s poem begins, “I remember you as you were in the last autumn,” but then later he must admit, “I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off.” The loss is revealed here in the distance between seasons which should be the same, but cannot be. Brian Patten’s poem has a similar effect, and he too sets it off from the beginning by saying, “Alice, this is my first winter / of waking without you.” Towards the end of the poem he begins to wonder if the season itself isn’t responsible for making the loss so hard to bear. Likewise, Ingeborg Bachmann’s “A Kind of Loss” also starts right off with what the lovers had: “Used together: seasons, books, a piece of music.” In all of these examples, by comparing the loss to the passage of time, the poets deal logically with what is simply unavoidable.

Another particularly effective way many of these poems express loss without being overly sentimental is the poet’s ability to step outside of his or her grief, and look outward. This technique makes all the difference in separating themselves from amateur poets, who tend to focus only on the inward pain. Bishop’s “One Art” and Bachmann’s “A Kind of Loss” mirror each other in this respect. Both compare the lost love with a sense of magnitude, of infinite proportions. The poems are rich with symbolism which compares the loss to everything from household objects to endless boundaries. Bishop herself has lost “two cities… / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” Bachmann’s poem claims a loss just as deep. Each saves the full weight of the emotion for the last stanza, and literally the last lines, leaving the reader to ponder their magnitude.

Other poems also look to the outside world and its imagery to address what is now gone. Both Aiken and Neruda conjure up lands and hills, and scenes from a ship. The poets seem as though they are traveling through life, and can sense the lover far off, in another world. Elizabeth Jennings and Brian Patten both look at familiar gardens and see that nothing has changed, except the lover’s absence, which of course changes everything. From as far away as Japan, Snyder recalls moments that he and his lost love spent together, years ago, in the orchards and forests of Oregon. In each of these moments the poets step outside of themselves and look to how the loss applies to what surrounds them, where they have been, what they can imagine. By invoking these scenes and images, the poets allow the reader to come to the same insights as they have: loss occurs not only internally, but throughout time and place. It causes you to reflect on the past and imagine what will never be in the future.

When taken in the context of pure loss, which I have done for this collection, the final three poems represent the role of memory. The word “loss” is not mentioned explicitly, but can certainly be implied when brought together with the other poems in the group. There is a timeless quality in the words woven among these three pieces as the poets look at forgetting, remembering, and memories. In this sense, the “Absence” in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem is permanent, not temporary. The scene that is set reminds me of one that the reader can return to at anytime and reflect, for as she says, it is “unchanged.” Neruda’s poem is written as a memory in itself. The final poem, Arthur Symon’s “You Remain,” feels as if it could be a postscript left unwritten in the other nine before it.

Admittedly, these poems are valuable to me for personal -- and yes -- sentimental reasons. Those of Millay, Bishop, and Aiken have been favorites of mine for many years and could be considered tokens of my past relationships. The other poems are new finds for me that echo the logic and loss I like so much about the three “originals.” As a happily married wife and mother now I read this collection and as Gary Snyder says so poignantly, “I feel ancient, as though I had / Lived many lives.” For even in my current life I have gone back to the gardens of Elizabeth Jenning’s “Absence,” and her words about lost love are true: “there was no sign that anything had ended / and nothing to instruct me to forget.” As these poems have taught me and I’m sure countless other readers, time goes on, but memories remain.

Stumbling upon these “new” poems within anthologies and books I found, as well as revisiting those three I’ve known for some time, was like discovering gems that needed to be dusted off and placed together to say, “Look, this is how it’s done.” These aren’t juvenile or bitter “break-up” poems. There is no anger directed toward the lost love, or wish for torture or hell or some other ill-will. I like to think these are for a more mature reader. Those who understand that loss in inevitable -- something we each face at one point or another. Certainly in each poem there is a sense that the loss is devastating, for they are definitely not emotionally detached. Somehow, though, these poets use that overwhelming sense of loss and combine it with a worldly awareness, a sense of the grand scale of things, an acceptance of time and circumstance. Each poem, then, becomes the preservation in time of a lost relationship as it relates to the ways of the world.

In arranging the sequence of the poems, I began to imagine them as evolving, much like life after the end of a relationship. Initially there is the acknowledgement of pure loss, then reflection and remembrance, then -- most painfully -- the absence of that person from your life. At some point then there is the realization that the love is quite firmly in place in memory, where it remains. If the love was anything worth all of the eloquence written here among these poems, then surely that is its rightful place.

By bringing this collection together, I hope to achieve at least two things. I hope the reader can appreciate the poems as I do, as reminders of lost love and how it can be preserved in the beautiful art of poetry. Something in these poems moves me to a sense of gratitude. In an odd way I am thankful these poems exist: through their language, emotions from my “past lives” have been given words, a tangible identity. I wish for the reader the discovery of themselves, or the memory of a lost love, somewhere among these words.

Secondly, I hope the reader gains a sense that poems about love and loss can be just as thoughtful as those about more “serious” intellectual subjects. Indeed, lost love is no less than a death, a pure absence. In a sense, it is even more surreal than physical death, since the lover actually lives in a parallel universe of sorts, in the same time and physical dimension. The poems presented here understand this inescapable dilemma, and offer a glimpse into how a poet can attempt to reason -- and write -- their way into accepting it.





EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY


Well, I Have Lost You

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish–and men do–
I shall have only good to say of you.





ELIZABETH BISHOP


One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

-Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.






INGEBORG BACHMANN (translated by Mark Anderson)


A Kind of Loss

Used together: seasons, books, a piece of music.
The keys, teacups, bread basket, sheets and a bed.
A hope chest of words, of gestures, brought back, used, used up.
A household order maintained. Said. Done. And always a hand was there.

I’ve fallen in love with winter, with a Viennese septet, with summer.
With village maps, a mountain nest, a beach and a bed.
Kept a calendar cult, declared promises irrevocable,
bowed before something, was pious to a nothing

(-to a folded newspaper, cold ashes, the scribbled piece of paper),
fearless in religion, for our bed was the church.

From my lake view arose my inexhaustible painting.
From my balcony I greeted entire peoples, my neighbors.
By the chimney fire, in safety, my hair took on its deepest hue.
The ringing at the door was the alarm for my joy.

It’s not you I’ve lost,
but the world.







GARY SNYDER


Four Poems for Robin

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets.
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.


A spring night in Shokoko-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.



An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”
After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known
where you were –
I might have gone back to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.
I didn’t.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dreams, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.



We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.








BRIAN PATTEN


Song for Last Year’s Wife

Alice, this is my first winter
of waking without you, of knowing
that you, dressed in familiar clothes
are elsewhere, perhaps not even
conscious of our anniversary. Have
you noticed? The earth’s still as hard,
the same empty gardens exist; it is
as if nothing special had changed.
I wake with another mouth feeding
from me, yet still feel as if
Love had not the right
to walk out of me. A year now. So
what? you say. I send out my spies
to discover what you are doing. They smile,
return, tell me your body’s as firm,
you are as alive, as warm and inviting
as when I knew you first…Perhaps it is
the winter, its isolation from other seasons,
that sends me your ghost to witness
when I wake. Somebody came here today, asked
how you were keeping, what
you were doing. I imagine you,
waking in another city, touched
by this same hour. So ordinary
a thing as loss comes now and touches me.






DARYL HINE


Letting Go

I loved you first the time I saw you last,
I knew you best before I let you go.
All the misapprehensions of the past
Dissipated in an hour or so.
Naked to the human eye you lay
Candid as a cadaver on the couch
I could have slept on, but I went away
Ashamed to stay, afraid almost to touch.

Lost, you seemed the only vivid thing
In a world made moribund and flat
By worldliness. Renunciations bring
Their own reward, apparently, like that
Last look of yours, ironical or tender,
A valediction and a benediction,
Which endless reruns will not soon surrender,
The indispensable, improper fiction
Of your unforgettable perfection.







CONRAD AIKEN


And Already the Minutes

And already the minutes, the hours, the days,
Separate thoughts and separate ways,
Fall whitely and silently and slowly between us,
Fall between us like phantasmal rain and snow.
And we, who were thrust for an instant so sharply together,
Under changing skies to alien destinies go.

Melody heard in the midnight on the wind, -
Orange poppy of fire seen in a dream, -
Vainly I try to keep you. How the sky,
A great blue wind, with a gigantic laugh,
Scorns us apart like chaff.
Like a bird blown to sea am I.

O let us hold, amid these immensities,
The blinding blaze of the hostile infinite,
To the one clear phrase we knew and still may know:
Walls rise daily and darkly between us
But love has seen us,
Wherever we go love too must go.

Beautiful, twilight, mysterious, bird-haunted land
Seen from the ship, with the far pale shore of sand,
And the blue deep folds of hills inviting the stars to rest,
Though I shall never set foot there, nor explore you,
Nor hear your angelus of bells about me, I shall adore you
And know you still the best.






ELIZABETH JENNINGS


Absence

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name.





PABLO NERUDA


I Remember You as You Were

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.

I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
towards which my deep longings migrated
and my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.





ARTHUR SYMONS


You Remain

As a perfume doth remain
In the folds where it hath lain,
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me; all things leave me –
You remain.

Other thoughts may come and go,
Other moments I may know
That shall waft me, in their going,
As a breath blown to and fro,
Fragrant memories; fragrant memories
Come and go.

Only thoughts of you remain
In my heart where they have lain,
Perfumed thoughts of you, remaining,
A hid sweetness, in my brain.
Others leave me; all things leave me –
You remain.







WORKS CITED

Aiken, Conrad. “And Already the Minutes.” Masterpieces of American Poets. Ed. Mark Van
Doren. New York: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1936. 558.

Bachmann, Ingeborg. “A Kind of Loss.” Trans. Mark Anderson. Bartlett’s Poems for All
Occasions. Ed. Geoffrey O’Brien. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004. 360-61.

Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art.” The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and
Sorrow. Coll. by Robert Pinsky. New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1998. 12.

Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Hine, Daryl. “Letting Go.” Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 1868-69.

Jennings, Elizabeth. “Absence.” PoemHunter.com. 25 Nov. 2007.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/absence/

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Well, I Have Lost You.” The Clock’s Loneliness. 21 Nov. 2007.
http://www.erzsebel.com/poetry/?p=658

Neruda, Pablo. “I Remember You As You Were.” Immortal Poetry. 28 Nov. 2007.
http://immortalpoetry.com/I_Remember_You_As_You_Were

New Advent. Catholic Encyclopedia: “Angelus Bell.” 20 Nov. 2007.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01487a.htm

Patten, Brian. “Song for Last Year’s Wife.” The Clock’s Loneliness. 25 Nov. 2007.
http://www.erzsebel.com/poetry/?p=874

Snyder, Gary. “Four Poems for Robin.” Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 1817-19.

Symons, Arthur. “You Remain.” PoemHunter.com. 24 Nov. 2007.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/you-remain/

Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “In Memoriam A.H.H. (LXXXV).” The Tennyson Page. 21 Nov. 2007
http://charon.sfsu.edu/tennyson/inmemoriam.html